The new MS Flight Simulator taught me how to fly an actual plane - Ars Technica

• Two GoPro cameras were mounted in the Cessna 172 plane that I flew over the Seattle area. I had never flown a real plane before. I had only played the new Microsoft Flight Simulator for about an hour; that was my only training.

  Sam Machkovech

• You can see the event required that the co-pilot not touch any of the plane's instruments. You can also see him bracing himself as I take full control of his plane on a gray Seattle day.

• After playing MSFS briefly, I learned how to manage slight turns and how the screens in front made clear the number of degrees based on the notches.

• A view of the Puget Sound area from my own smartphone camera.

• Here, my co-pilot is chilling out a bit.

• Now he's back to his "holding on for dear life" thing.

RENTON, Wash.—This month's Microsoft Flight Simulator world-premiere reveal event, held at a hangar just outside Seattle, was designed for two types of people. The first is the plane enthusiast, the kind of person who purchases pricey equipment in order to recreate the experience of piloting aircraft. Members of the new game's lead development team, Asobo Studio, were on hand to speak about reviving the decades-old MSFS brand and the inherent scrutiny those fans will direct at any rebirth.

The second type is me, a person who has logged very little time in one of those pricey, realistic flight-sim cockpits, let alone flying a real plane. I didn't even grow up playing MSFS, Janes, or other classic flight-sim series. Nobody in my family held aviation in esteem. For all the notes I took at the event about rotational weather systems, drag coefficients, and friction models, I got the feeling Microsoft and Asobo wanted to bowl me over with something a bit more specific and literal with its new Microsoft Flight Simulator, slated to launch on Windows PCs in "2020."

My MSFS kiosk was set up with a pre-loaded virtual flight opportunity: to take off in a Cessna 172 from the Renton Municipal Airport, then simulate flight around the cities, forests, and valleys of the Seattle area. Hours later, I would do the exact same thing... in real life, in a real Cessna 172, as the pilot.

Jeez, I thought to myself. This new version of the game better be realistic.

Update: I didn't die

To clarify: I did not manage my real flight's take-off or landing, in spite of practicing both in Microsoft Flight Simulator. And an instructor sat at my side the entire time I was in the real plane, ready to take control should I lose control or become uncomfortable. But, yes, I piloted a Cessna 172 for about a half-hour, managing its altitude and bearing in a trip that took me from Renton to Snoqualmie Falls and from Microsoft's Bellevue headquarters to the north end of Seattle itself.

This was Microsoft's gutsy effort to impress upon visiting journalists how good the company thought MSFS was in its current, pre-alpha state. I say "gutsy" because it's crazy to put a real-life flight up against a computer version in terms of visuals. Asobo has delivered a phenomenal rendering engine that juggles a mix of satellite data, machine-learning calculations, and procedurally generated buildings and terrain. It looks amazing on a computer, but I'm not crazy: the real thing looks better.

But the feeling of flight? Well, gosh. I'm barely an hour into the 100+ hours of flight time needed before I might qualify as licensed, so this is as anecdotal as it gets. But my time testing MSFS did a remarkable job of preparing me for the exact touch and execution needed to fly comfortably and reliably in the skies above Renton.

All of the nerves I had about real-life flight evaporated the moment I heard the command from my real-life Cessna's co-pilot: "Your plane." This was my cue to reply out loud, "My plane," and take firm grasp of the yoke. At which point, the sense of force feedback and required movement was seemingly identical to what I'd tested 1,600 feet below when I had been testing MSFS augmented by a Thrustmaster Pendular Rudder and a Saitek Pro Flight Yoke. (I got a hint of this 1:1 connection to the simulator before I was officially piloting the Cessna. I lightly had my hands and feet on my flight equipment in order to feel my instructor take off in nearly the exact same way I'd successfully done on a computer.)

I was also astonished by how much my real flight felt like the MSFS version I'd played an hour earlier when I encountered the mild turbulence of flying through wind and clouds.

In the game, this required flipping through a menu of weather presets, which had been set to a sunny-and-clear option before our arrival—and, c'mon, this is the Seattle area in September, so good weather is never a safe bet. A "live weather" option, on the other hand, delivered a more realistic volley of thin, transparent clouds and associated wind patterns. The game version didn't look exactly as gray-yet-clear as my real flight, but my need to adjust my bearing 5-10 degrees to account for regular wind did. I certainly exclaimed in mild panic when this happened in real life, but I was glad to have been prepared for it.

Fuel to the Flight Simulator fire

• This shot looks very familiar to me... because it's the same airfield my above flight took off from, as rendered in the new MSFS.

  Microsoft

• This, if you're wondering, is how the real thing looked in front of my lap. The rest of this gallery is made up of MSFS footage.

  Sam Machkovech

• Is that Seattle over there, to the northwest?

• Yes, it is, and we can take a better look by pulling the camera to a third-person view.

• Use buttons in the game to look around.

• More footage from a virtual takeoff out of virtual Renton.

• I was sent a sequence of another virtual flight buzzing around the Seattle area. This one is identical to what I saw in my gameplay session.

• The abundant detail on the shore is critical for the sake of recognizing where you might be flying. Which coast is it? That matters in a region where there are zillions of peninsulas.

• Incredible detail on the shore, all cobbled together by Asobo Studio's use of metadata to render its own 3D geometry and buildings.

• The flight continues.

• City data isn't 1:1 with real life, mind you, but some of the landmarks are remarkably accurate. This isn't just a satellite scan slapped onto the ground below.

• MSFS doesn't mess around with its volumetric cloud system.

Earlier this summer, Microsoft teased its new version of Flight Simulator during its E3 keynote. While tantalizing, the 60-second video flew by without answering some key questions. How would this new version of MS Flight Simulator work? Who was producing it? When was it coming? Would it run on Xbox consoles (a first for the series)?

A lengthy presentation from the game's lead developers at Asobo Studio answered all of these questions and then some. That first question, of course, was: wait, Asobo? Who's that?

Peeking at the French developer's roster of recent games might make a flight-sim diehard scratch their head, since it includes zero flying games. The company has been a supporting developer for various Xbox Game Studios properties for years, whether by leading on Kinect and HoloLens games or supporting the development of "core" Xbox games like Quantum Break. But it's Fuel, an open-world driving adventure from 2009, that kept on coming up in conversations at the MSFS event.

"I can tell you that the flight-simulation problem—the streaming of an entire Earth at high levels of detail plus altitude change—requires a proprietary engine," Microsoft Flight Simulator head Jorg Neumann told Ars. "Asobo had made Fuel in 2009, then known to be the biggest game world [on a console]. That'd never been done before. Why? Because they procedurally generated it. They took the best places from satellite photos, condensed them, and made a game world out of it. The trees, grass, terrain were procedural. They'd already solved some of the problems hitting you when you're rendering at this scale. When you're in control of your own engine, you can go to double precision floating points without a problem. If you're on a third-party engine, good luck with that! That's a fundamental architectural change."

The whole world

This custom engine work, which emerged well before the likes of No Man's Sky tackled procedurally generated worlds, convinced Neumann to sign Asobo onto Microsoft's select second-party slew of developers... but not to make an open-world game. This is when he led efforts at Xbox's Kinect team, a tricky platform that required its own efficient engine work, and it stayed in the back of his mind while the Asobo crew worked on the first wave of major HoloLens games and apps and while he additionally worked on that platform's room-scanning technologies.

Neumann's appreciation for the team's HoloLens work inspired him to drop a franchise reboot possibility in Asobo's lap. In 2016, he asked the studio to prototype a realistic, playable flight sequence over the Seattle area, using a mix of Bing satellite map data and procedurally generated 3D details. His question to Asobo: could the studio combine existing map data with a Fuel-like game engine to make a virtual flight over Seattle seem realistic? Could that workflow then be applied to... the entire planet?

The prototype was shown to Xbox head Phil Spencer later that year, to which he murmured, "Why are we looking at this video?" Then the Neumann and the team pressed a controller to show they could manipulate the action in real time. "He looked at me, I looked at him, and he said, 'Are we really going back?'" Neumann recalled. "'If we're doing this, we're in it for the long run. You're in it for the long run.'" And Neumann told Ars Technica that the plan is indeed a long-term vision: Asobo and Xbox Game Studios are pledging 10 years of support for this version of Microsoft Flight Simulator. That begins with an insane scope.

With previous MSFS releases, "People didn't like that it was just flying between two states, 1-2 planes," Neumann said. "They didn't like that it wasn't the Earth. Can you compromise on that? Nope. Now we know there's 44,000 airports across the globe. For this game, that's the baseline."

Listing image by Sam Machkovech

Fly through the cloud, connect to the cloud

• Manhattan.

  Microsoft

• A better look at Manhattan. I had a pleasant time playing with a weather slider while going over this familiar skyline, turning everything from midnight to sunrise to sunset.

• A good day to fly a Cessna.

• Hi, Paris.

• Hi, little Daher.

• In its current pre-alpha state, MSFS often looks this majestic to fly over. (But as you can see in the article, some zones aren't quite as handsomely rendered just yet.)

• The water is the most evident stuff in terms of sunlight reflections, but so much of this game's 3D geometry reacts handsomely to various times of day and various weather patterns.

• Not bad.

• A beautiful day for a DR-400 flight.

Notice that mention of Bing? That's not the only Microsoft service being leveraged to run the new MSFS. The game will also rely on a whopping two petabytes of satellite and geographical data in Microsoft's Azure Cloud system, which each MSFS instance can connect to in order to render any portion of the planet as realistically as possible.

Asobo was quick to confirm that the game will work in a variety of offline modes. Players will be able to designate a maximum offline cache size on their computer, which the game can then either fill with geographical data from a preferred region or with wherever you previously flew when you were last connected to the Internet. Should you wish to unplug from the Internet after installing the game, you can expect a more rudimentary visual experience, as Asobo's rendering system relies heavily on a stream of satellite scans and metadata on top of the base Earth scans installed with the game.

I went back to my demo kiosk and picked from thousands of available airports. (Seriously, they're going for all 44,000 on the planet here. It's no overstatement.) An Asobo staffer invited us to fly from our own hometown airports and find our neighborhoods, so I did that by buzzing over downtown Dallas, where I lived once upon a time. But the team hadn't fleshed out an optimized model of that metropolis, and that meant the major landmarks I'd seen handsomely modeled in other cities were nowhere to be found. Reunion Tower was a tall, square building. The Calatrava Bridge was a slightly raised bump in the geometry over a river. And the terrifying "mixmaster" of combined highways near downtown wasn't rendered in full 3D. Somehow, the American Airlines Center was immaculately rendered in the middle of this stew of unfinished terrain.

The locally rendered engine did its best to combine visible map data from a satellite feed and Asobo's procedural terrain generation system, so there was indeed a skyline of generic-looking buildings where they were supposed to be, along with reflective water, car-lined highways, and realistic-looking trees below. This essentially was the worst-case scenario of how the game renders major cities in an "offline" or unoptimized mode.

International

Other cities in the alpha fare much better. With the additional pump of Azure's pool of data, and with terrain and building models down to "30cm of accuracy," the results looked all the more incredible, with stunningly accurate geometry everywhere from bustling metropolises (Manhattan, Seattle, Paris) to oases of nature.

For the latter case, I spent about 20 minutes of my gameplay demo piloting a virtual Cessna 172 all the way from downtown Seattle to Mount Rainier. I began my route simply by looking ahead in the horizon and seeing a bonkers-accurate range of Cascades mountains all around, just like I might see on an average clear day in the Pacific Northwest. The result was an incredible flying experience dotted with the valleys, towns, industrial centers, and rivers that carve the world where I currently live. And when I tapped a shortcut key to fly once more over Seattle, I really could pick out significant natural and manmade landmarks by tapping a "look below" shortcut to get my bearings.

This proved out Asobo's mission of delivering true "visual flight rules" (or VFR) while in a plane. "After our own personal flight lessons, we can use a town or a river to direct our flights and know where we're going," Asobo engine lead Lionel Fuentes said. And he wants MSFS players to enjoy the same sensation.

A connection to Azure Cloud's treasure trove of data lets the engine grab more of this useful data, ranging from detailed renders of specific landmarks to more generic metadata like the color of roofs or more precise foliage data for a given forest or valley. That metadata is arguably the more useful stuff for the sake of VFR, since Asobo's MSFS relies so heavily on procedurally generated terrain and buildings. It's the difference between looking down and seeing a generic slew of buildings and trees up against the ocean's edge and looking down and seeing enough detail to pick out exactly which Puget Sound park that is.

In my case, Seattle's Gasworks Park didn't look as realistically rendered as the Space Needle, but it was good enough to help me find my bearing from its neighborhood to the next. Depending on where you call home on this planet, that kind of fine detail may very well be your VFR difference maker.

Xbox? Virtual reality?

The entire Microsoft event revolved MSFS running on Windows 10 PCs—massive ones, at that, with high-end graphics cards. These systems occasionally struggled to keep up with a 60fps refresh, sometimes hitching for three- or six-second pauses for inexplicable, "pre-alpha" reasons. That was arguably due to a mix of unoptimized code, network issues, and sheer power. Which brings us to the Xbox question.

Yes, Microsoft Flight Simulator will come to Xbox consoles at some point, Neumann said, and it will be an Xbox Game Pass title on that platform, just like its Windows 10 version will be. And, yes, the game will be available either as part of XGP or as a standalone purchase.

But the game's announced "2020" launch window is for Windows 10, not Xbox consoles, and there's no indication on whether the console version will have specific limitations. Might it require online streaming? Might it require an Xbox One X minimum? Microsoft isn't saying.

"We honestly don't have a date for Xbox, otherwise we might've said something," Neumann told Ars Technica. "Is there a parallel effort related to Xbox [development]? Yeah, but it's very modest at this point. Our first and foremost topic is getting the simulation right, then do as much as we can from the [closed beta] feedback."

Asobo reps also made clear that VR is not currently in the cards for this version of MSFS, in spite of pretty much every member of the attending press asking that exact question. "Maybe one day, Flight Simulator will," Asobo CCO and co-founder David Dedeine told Ars. "It's not a commitment at all," he added with a laugh. "But we're already thinking about VR... We've worked on HoloLens, so we're familiar with [VR]'s types of problematics."

Closed alpha approaches; third parties are already involved

• My event's testing rig. (The image on the screen is of pre-rendered footage, not live gameplay. We weren't allowed to capture any of our actual session, sadly.)

  Sam Machkovech

• Thrustmaster.

• Saitek.

• Keyboard and yoke/rudder controls.

The rest of the presentation revolved around every factor that affects the feeling of flight, including "live" weather fed from online services, cloud density, and various friction systems. But no matter how long I had to play the demo at the MSFS event, I couldn't truly test and scrutinize every promised upgrade. As an example, Asobo insisted that a new collision model was developed to enable take-offs and landings on sloped surfaces ("they're never a flat plane," a staffer remarked), which will likely require a lot more scrutiny from pro flyers. In my novice attempts to land planes, I learned that MSFS's collision system is currently missing a key aspect: detection of my plane barreling through nearby buildings when my landing failed. (Its collision system also didn't like when I perfectly piloted a Cessna beneath a bridge, sigh.)

Asobo confirmed that the game's full system of handling friction, weather, and other relevant flight systems began with the legacy codebase from 2005's MS Flight Simulator X. Again, Asobo was brought aboard to implement its own custom engine—so it could pull off tricks like rendering the entire planet—but the French studio combed through the existing codebase to understand "not just the universe of aviation but the universe of simulation." Should users be married to the previous game's tunings, certain toggles within the new MSFS will let those players revert to older simulation models, but it's currently unclear exactly which in-game systems will receive such toggles.

By the way, your chance to try the game is coming very, very soon, and you can sign up for the new game's "Insider" program right now to potentially test the game's first "closed alpha" starting in October. That demo will likely include similar content to what I tested. Thousands of airports appear on a manipulable globe, and then players will pick one, choose an aircraft, and either go through a pre-flight checklist (with the ability to mouse over every dial, button, and screen in a cockpit) or automatically ready up for takeoff. Only three aircraft were available in my demo: the Cessna 172, Robin DR400, and Daher TBM 930. It's unclear whether more aircraft will appear in the closed alpha. But Asobo doesn't sound like it will restrict flights anywhere around the globe for its first wave of players.

Asobo says it wants the community's feedback in a big way, and in a good-faith gesture, the company is already working with third-party developers who've made and sold add-ons to existing Flight Simulator games. Shortly after the new game's E3 reveal, existing third-party devs began talking to Asobo. NDAs were signed and reps flew to meet with Asobo and Microsoft, receive the upcoming game's SDK, and affirm their interest in having their add-on wares hosted both in an in-game digital-download shop and at their own privately hosted sites. (I can't recall a recent Microsoft or Xbox game that came with such a pledge.) Neither Microsoft nor Asobo confirmed which existing third-party add-ons were involved in this process or when their efforts may be revealed as attachments to the upcoming game.

“I want to have a ‘why’”

• A walk down MSFS memory lane.

  Sam Machkovech

• I almost dinged Microsoft a few points for the cheesiness of this "museum," but then I remembered that they put me up in a freaking plane.

• I'd pay for the new game to come in a classic box like this.

• I'm not nearly as fond of these '90s boxes.

For now, Asobo is focused on gathering players' feedback, seeing where they fly, and seeing how they use MSFS's current incredibly open system of merely picking an airport and flying around. Which, to some people, might just sound like a glorified Google Earth, Bing Edition. I pressed Neumann on this: doesn't having a beautifully rendered planet open the door for all kinds of gameplay possibilities?

He stuck firmly to dreaming of what the engine might support for future Flight Simulator modes and how such content could be guided by closed alpha feedback.

"We are multiplayer," Neumann said. "This is the Xbox group, after all. Where that exactly goes, people will tell us. Like, 'I really want to be a co-pilot, to have a real instructor call into my sim from my house on an iPad.' Cool, awesome, that's one way. If people want that, it could happen. The only thing I can say with certainty is we can't have everything at launch. We'll get prioritization from the community we already have. That'll guide us. Some ideas and maybe passions to do certain things.

"I am a biologist," Neumann continued. "I love animals, the planet is alive, and I'd love to see that in our world simulation here. But also, some things planes do in reality. Whether it's someone doing rescue helicopters, or whatever. I wouldn't be surprised if people say, 'Search and rescue, this, that, and the other, we need that in the sim.' Then, OK, what's the most important one? We will listen, and we will keep evolving."

But first and foremost is the sensation of flight—which Dedeine insisted was a driver for the game's realistic visual approach, as opposed to a directive to slap "Bing" onto another Microsoft product.

"I want to have a 'why' to everything we make," Dedeine said to Ars. "Now we can integrate awesome, real-world data into a simulation. Why are we doing this? As we studied how to fly aircraft at the same time, it went immediately further than making it beautiful. Having a beautiful world to explore is great to have as a goal. I love traveling. But we found when you fly, they teach you: look at the ground. Not at your cockpit all the time. You don't want to get lost. Knowing the terrain, having a map, looking at the ground, understanding where you are, you learn in pilot training that you always follow a highway, a rail, a lake. There's always something you connect to in the world to fly around. To not get lost. We said, OK, we can do this now. We couldn't before. There wasn't enough data to cover the world. This became a goal: pilots need these waypoints to navigate via VFR. That's when our story evolved."

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https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/09/the-new-ms-flight-simulator-taught-me-how-to-fly-an-actual-plane/

2019-09-30 07:01:00Z
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